Dvořák & Varèse

Dvořák & Varèse

"It seems at first a bit perverse, pairing Dvorak’s warm and friendly “New World” Symphony with Varèse’s bellicose and blistering vision of new worlds. More fascinating in any case than the theme of the composers’ physical and psychic encounters with new worlds, whether fleeting or permanent, is the distance musical possibilities themselves had traveled in the mere three decades between the Dvorak (1893) and the Varèse (1922), the great watershed having been Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” (1913), which Varèse mines for all it is worth. The live performances here do equal justice to the coziness and the riotous upheavals."